Abandon Hollywood – Kevin Spacey Redux

When I was an 18-year-old senior in high school, Kevin Spacey groped me.

It was 2008, and he was directing my father, Richard Dreyfuss, in a play called Complicit at the Old Vic in London. I’d come to visit for Christmas Break. It happened one night when the three of us were alone in Kevin’s apartment rehearsing my father’s lines. My father didn’t see, and I didn’t tell him about the incident for many years. Instead, I spent the next nine years telling people the story at parties for laughs.

Yeah… Kevin Spacey is the human equivalent of a pig lagoon… a festering pool of excrement. The only difference is a pig lagoon actually benefits people.

Kevin Spacey is not an anomaly, he is not the exception, he is the fundamental character of Hollywood. Since its beginning Hollywood has been a cesspool of abuse (financially, physically, sexually).

You know all of this stereotypical things people hate about Wall Street? That it’s ruthless, built to benefit the few at the top, filled to the brim with abusive behavior? Yeah that’s actually how Hollywood does business.

Whether it’s by charging fake fees to movie production companies so that actors won’t get a share of sales or if it’s sexually assaulting endless numbers of actors… it is all about maintaining a system that benefits the few, the handful of elites, the “great directors” of our world.

It is a system of abuse… people are lured in by the promise of fame and wealth… and are then locked into accepting that system of abuse by the implied or literal threat to their reputation and livelihood by the abuser.

And if people continue to buy into this system… if they continue to ignore the terrible things people do… if they continue to think that the only way to succeed, to make a show, to get their script out there, to become a great actor, the system will not change. That is exactly what the system is built around. Hollywood is built upon the premise that you can only be successful if you accept their abuse. The system will continue to be abusive, will continue to hurt society, will continue to be immoral and hateful. Only by changing your behavior can such an abusive system be brought to an end.

So walk away. Do things on your own, work with others outside Hollywood, technology is now fully on your side. You have distribution options, production equipment, marketing options that the people of the past could only dream of.